Category: the daily column

There is a chill in the air that is undeniable now, a distinct snap to the edge of the wind that makes it much too tempting to stay indoors at all times. It was exactly a year ago that I was leaving London for home, glad to be escaping the creeping cold and dark that I’d experienced for the first time – this year though, there’s no such quick escape.

The mornings are as cold as I’d ever experienced in Australia, at 3 or 4 degrees. I try to delay as much as possible leaving the house, the temptation of “working from home” hard to resist simply for not having to get out of bed. The midday sun is roughly at the height of the sun in Australia at 8 o’clock of a winter morning, the shadows stretching long towards the north. It’s still a month and a half yet to Midwinter’s.
Things that suddenly make sense that didn’t 6 months ago:

• Thermal underwear
• Overcoats
• Beanies, gloves, and practically the full range of proper winter clothing
• Ear muffs
• Electric blankets
• Soup
• Frostbite

Things that don’t make sense any more:

• People who argue that cold is better than warm weather because you can wear more clothes to make up for it.
• People who live in colder places than this.

Feb 15th. That’s my final return date. Can’t friggen wait.

May contain spoilers!

Heroes

Heroes is back! I had a fear that this would be somewhat like the second season of Lost, where more and more plot elements were going to be added until it was all an addled mess that wanders around and goes nowhere; up until this week’s episode, that fear wasn’t too far from being proven true.

But this week, they bought it back, and threw in a cute little twist to boot. I likey. There was no sign of the Alejandro-Maya-Sylar plot thread, which was a relief (can a character get more annoying than Maya or a plot thread more predictable than theirs?), but it inevitably means an extended sequence next episode.

On the other hand, one of Lost‘s plus points – its ability to kill off major characters just as you got to liking them, thereby simultaneously exasperating and reinvigorating for your interest – is a little lacking, to my inexpert opinion.

Top Gear

My god, it just gets better and better. This week found our intrepid trio driving across Botswana in second hand £1500 two-wheel-drive cars, a challenge most would only contemplate in serious 4-wheel-drives.

They turned up with cars I would suggest would be much cheaper than £1500, given what showed up for a similar Porsche challenge, but let’s not let that get in the way of a stupendously funny episode.

If you’re not watching Top Gear, what are you doing with your Sundays?! (ok, Mondays by the time it gets to Australia) Get to it.

30 Rock

I picked this up on a whim after seeing a little sample back in the first season, and I reckon I’ll be sticking with it for a bit. It’s not exactly predicable or by the numbers, but it sits firmly in the American-New York Sitcom genre.

Guest appearances weekly make it lively, Tina Fey is a talent (cute to boot!) and Alec Baldwin is straight out of his role in Will and Grace, the campness toned down a little for a little more general asshole-ness. It’s awesome!

Secret Diary of a London Call Girl

I never followed the Intimate Adventures blog, but I had heard about it – and when I heard Billie Piper (yes, the former pop singer, but did you see that series or two of Doctor Who? She was kick-ass!) was playing the title character, I just had to watch. (alright alright, pipe down).

I’m… a little surprised at what these guys are more-than-ready to put on free-to-air broadcast-TV week-to-week – and it’s getting further into it by the looks of things. Sure, timeslot, mature European attitude, all that and a bag of chips, but I would struggle to imagine any of the Australian networks airing this, no matter what the timeslot. America? HBO would pretty much be your only bet.

It’s a well-written left of the middle show, and my only regret is that I hadn’t and am not reading it now. Having just cut back on my RSS feeds, I’m not subscribing too any more for a bit, and really, I think I would only imagine Billie Piper as Belle now.

It’s also a little disconcerting to see places I’m getting very familiar with in London show up in the TV show – sure, there’s the famous spots, but this will have, for example, Belle walking to catch a bus… about 2 minutes walk from my work, where I pass by almost daily on my way in. Ordinary world reflected through the half-silvered mirror of the TV.

Others? There’s always The Daily Show, though that is threatened with the American writers’ strike. And… well, not much else to be honest. Lost, Ugly Betty, House, and practically every show I used to watch have all fallen by the wayside for reason or another, and plus, it doesn’t help that I don’t have a TV :)

Think some celebrations are entirely random? You wait till you see Bonfire Night (a.k.a. Guy Fawkes Night) in England.

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,

The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,

I know of no reason

Why Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot.

The last four days or so – since Halloween really – fireworks have been going off around London, from various spots. Tonight, they’re celebrating in earnest, with fireworks going off pretty much everywhere, even from backyards.

When I asked for someone to tell me why, they said it was to celebrate the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot (1605), when a bunch of religious fanatics Catholics tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament with the honourable members inside, along with the King.

Far be it for me to question traditions, but celebrating it by… blowing up fireworks? You gotta wonder at the logic. Was there a surplus of gunpowder by any chance? I can imagine this didn’t go on too much during the world wars. Sounds vaguely like various bits of London are getting bombed on a regular basis.

And today, it would have been called a “terrorist incident” – bombs! religion! politicians! Will the Americans be celebrating 9/11 400 years from now with fireworks? (too soon?) :P Ah, you gotta love the English.

(on the other hand, Friday is Diwali – a perfectly good reason to blow up fireworks!)

more of the same, again.

I want to remember the days when I had something to reach for – someone perhaps? – that made me rise up. I want to be sucked into an unreality, something that has me rushing home to do something other than wander the net again.

Maybe that’s it – maybe breaking the cycle of  the same little world is what’s needed. Change. Shift.

Maybe I just want to go home, now.

So obviously I can’t talk about what happened, but I think it went alright. I didn’t trip over any taboo areas, didn’t spill on anything, and ended up being less nervous than the interview subject :)

On the other hand, now my boss thinks I can do it -_-; I find more and more that the process of getting ahead at work is about stumbling into areas that you could potentially do (and potentially scares the pants off you) and having a go above everything, more so than drawing on the allegedly vast pools of knowledge that I was supposed to have come out of university with.

Someone warned me about this, but I guess I wasn’t paying enough attention.

Yesterday, as I’m about to go for a shower, I go downstairs to check if the boiler is on, the water hot – that’s one thing that London certainly does differently, unlike in Sydney where I just have hot water all the time – and I find my housemate peering into a tiny little hole on the front of the box.

“Hey mate, what’s up?”

“The little blue light… what do you call it?”

“The pilot light?”

“Yeah, yeah! It’s not there. I think that’s why the water isn’t warming.”

“Yeah, crap.”

So yeah. No boiler. Approaching a London winter. The phrase “Up shit creek,” and “No paddle to speak of,” comes to mind.

Cold (perhaps freezing would be more appropriate?) shower this morning, no idea how long it’ll take to fix. Living in these temperate zones is so overrated. Give me sub-tropical or tropical any day.

ME?! What the hell?!

While reading this:

I laffed. But it’s probably just me.

When buying a coat, remember to consider the following:

• Pockets. Proper pockets you can really jam you hands into. You can’t imagine how important this is until it’s 7:30 in the morning and there’s a bit of a breeze blowing.
• Check that it fits over your usual work stuff. A coat is not a substitute for your standard suit jacket.
• Make sure it’s longer than your usual suit length! Nothing like a short coat to make you look a fool.
• Check you can button it up so that little draughts can’t get in, coz that’s baaaaad.
• Side-slits to get at your pants-pockets would be useful, though.
• Check that it’s not going to whimp out in the rain, or whatever cheap-imitation-of you may have in your town.
• Be prepared to spend money (When I saw a £1000 suit from a non-designer brand, that freaked me a little)

My best piece of advice though?

• Move some where you’ll never need it. Like Singapore.

:)

The world of ties is a little curiouser than I imagined. Ever since that conversation, I’ve mentioned it a couple of times – in appropriate circumstances, of course – and I’ve got varied replies.

One was most interesting, pointing out that the length of the tie is also something indicative, as it can be made longer or shorter depending on where the first cross-over point is – a tie which ends below the belt buckle apparently indicates an available bachelor. This ties (ed: I’m sorry) right in with the previous conversation, and had the person who know the length as being an indicator suddenly realising why it meant what it meant. Presumably the shorter the tie the less attention that is being drawn to the man-bits? of course there’s a limit (i.e. when the thinner end pokes out from behind the wider end, but that could mean something else entirely!), but it’s interesting to think…

Ties (or more correctly Neck ties) are descended from the Cravat, according to Wikipedia. A cravat is a thin scarf type thing that European types wear to make themselves look fancy. Cravats serve much the same purpose as a scarf, and are themselves descended from something the Roman soldiers used to wear (ah, there we are – antiquity, where it was once purposeful, now turns into an unnecessary bit of fluff. Hooray modernity!).

And the other thing is that I’ve discovered there are 85 ways of tying the tie. Eighty-five! I’d only been taught one – apparently, one of the more complex, the full Windsor knot – and seeing as this comes in at number 31 of rising complexity, I’m pleased to find easier alternatives =) Of those eighty-five, nineteen are named (and not variances on the named version), and there’s one which is a modifier for pretty much all (the Onassis), resulting in 170 all up really! Oh the possibilities. Of course most can’t be told from another, but that’s just by-the-by. 85 ways people! Imagine how many you could impress with your tie mastery!

(Shall we call this a Research Thursday then? :D)